Friday 23 April 2010 15.47 EDT
First published on Friday 23 April 2010 15.47 EDT

BA has increased the price of long-haul tickets from airports where customers remain stranded following the volcanic eruption in Iceland, placing them on sale to other travellers for as much as £4,700.

Passengers stuck in India, China and the US said the earliest flights they have been offered leave more than two weeks from now even though the airline has put on sale tickets for flights that depart sooner. Many are furious the seats have been placed on the open market when they are desperate to get home and are facing increasingly chaotic situations.

At Delhi airport today, dozens of stranded BA passengers queued for several hours in intense heat for only a handful of seats. Some are said to be running out of medicines for chronic illnesses while the most desperate are sleeping on terminal floors in an effort to get the first available seats home.

Tonight BA denied allegations it is profiteering by putting the seats on sale and said it was unavoidable because of the technicalities of its booking system and that the tickets could be reserved by stranded passengers for free.

The airline said: "To protect seats for BA customers who had their flight cancelled because of the closure, we have priced all available seats at the highest fares specifically to discourage new customers from buying them." It also claimed the high prices were intended to prevent travel agents and other airlines buying up tickets, thereby denying BA customers a route home.

But with stranded customers experiencing extreme difficulties accessing tickets because of reservation phonelines taking three hours to connect and problems with accessing the BA website from airports, that explanation was greeted with scepticism amid confusion about how the company was handling the allocation of seats.

"It is pure greed," said Erica Wald, an academic at the London School of Economics who was told her earliest replacement flight from Mumbai would be on 6 May. "If they were interested in getting people back, they would just freeze all the seats. They told us initially they would not sell new seats. People are so desperate somebody will pay that money to get back."

She said just four of the 60 stranded passengers who managed to get into the airport to try to catch Thursday's flight to London were given seats. There were more stranded passengers who couldn't get into the airport because you need a boarding pass or to bribe a security guard to get in, she added.

Saleem Althaf, an accident and emergency doctor stranded in Chennai, tried to buy one of the tickets but was told by BA in India the flights were exclusively for new customers, advice which BA in London said was wrong.

BA said putting all available seats on open sale was "the only technical solution we had available to us to help rebook as many of our own customers as possible on to each flight".

"Our stranded customers are not being asked to pay anything extra when we rebook them," it said. "Our best advice to customers who want to return sooner than their rebooking date is to keep checking on ba.com, contacting British Airways directly or your travel agent to see if an earlier option has become available. We deeply regret the distress and disruption our customers are suffering and we thank them for the patience they are showing."

Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrats transport spokesman, said BA's decision to put tickets on sale was "insensitive at best, insulting at worst".

"The priority of the airline should be to get stranded people back," he said. "One wonders if BA's strategy of putting up the prices is to encourage people who are stranded to buy a ticket again at a much greater price to get back more quickly."

Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, said: "I have today urged BA to do all they can for customers stranded abroad, after what will have been a week from hell for thousands of families. I believe it is vital for all airlines to make it a top priority to get these people home."

Ryanair said today it was likely to have cleared the backlog of disrupted passengers by tomorrow and scheduled three extra flights from Spain to London and Dublin. The Civil Aviation Authority said the operational situation now appears to be stabilising following Met Office advice the volcanic ash cloud is moving north. Extra easyJet flights from Corfu and Gran Canaria were due to land in the UK tonight. The airline said it had leased several extra planes and trebled the size of its call centre to cope with the backlog.